I-140 final-stage wait hits a tentative 12-week low as the active backlog grows

The I-140 final-stage wait, measured as median days from a case's last reported status to approval, came in at 20 days for the week of May 18, down 9 days from 30 the week prior and the lowest reading in the 12-week window examined here. This should be treated as an early signal rather than a settled result: the week's sample of 975 approved cases is roughly half the typical weekly volume of about 1,500, and thin-week reads for I-140 have historically shifted when the full count comes in. At the same time, the active backlog (pending cases not yet adjudicated) rose from roughly 34,600 to 40,355 in just 18 days, a 16.6% increase. Both signals deserve to share the headline.

Over the past 8 weeks, the final-stage median appears to be improving at a rate of about 2.5 days per week. The regression's R² of 0.48 is moderate: the direction is plausible, but the residual standard deviation of 7 days means any individual week can land well above or below the trend line. The 12-week range runs from 20 to 44 days, which illustrates how wide that scatter has been in practice.

One detail worth noting is the compression at the upper end of the wait distribution. The 75th percentile (p75), the boundary above which the slowest quarter of cases fall, reached 187 days in the week of April 13 and came in at just 57 days this week. That compression, if it holds, would matter most for applicants who had been waiting longer than the median. With a preliminary sample of 975 cases, it is too early to call this change durable; the W23 read will be more informative.

The active backlog of pending I-140 cases grew from roughly 34,600 to 40,355 between May 7 and May 25, a 5,742-case increase (+16.6%) in 18 days. The May 2026 filing-month group accounts for most of the growth, adding 4,038 active cases over that window. This is in line with a filing-volume story: new petitions are entering the pipeline faster than existing ones are clearing. A faster final-stage median and a growing queue are not contradictory; they reflect different parts of the same process.

The approval rates by filing-month group give a sense of the pace at each stage of maturity. The March 2026 group, at 12 weeks of age, is 48.7% approved across 15,297 total cases. The February 2026 group at 16 weeks stands at 54.8% across 16,199 cases. The January 2026 group at 20 weeks is at 50.3% across 13,702 cases, slightly below February's rate at the same point in the prior cycle. That gap may reflect the backlog pressure that has been building since early 2026, though the data does not tell us the mechanism.